This report is focused around Lost and Found data using the intakes and outcomes data received for 2021. Its goal is to reflect everything we could learn about L&F from the available data, make sure the numbers we see make sense, and highlight things that would be useful to show but some/all data required for them are missing.
Date range: 2021-01-01 to 2021-10-31
Scroll down or use the table of contents on the left to navigate throughout the document. Most sections contain multiple tabs showing different facets of a data type. Most plots are interactive, meaning they include tooltips and allow hiding and showing parts and zooming in and out. If something went wrong, look for the house icon in the top right corner of each figure to reset.
This section provides an overview of the RTH rate per year divided by species. We only included 2021 data here because we had it in the most detailed form, and we can extend any of these to previous years as relevant.
This table covers all strays and RTHs. Animals younger than 4 weeks are excluded from stray and RTH calculations. RTH rates shown below are the number of strays with RTO outcome out of all strays.
When we go over this, let’s make sure we calculate the rate the same way you do, so we would want to make sure what we see makes sense. If these numbers are right, they are lower than the national and HASS averages, which are at 30% RTH rate (for dogs). When we looked at past years, we did note this was slighly higher than 2019 and 2020 that had 7-10% return rates for strays.
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2021 | 526 | 8 | 0.02 |
| Dog | 2021 | 2396 | 274 | 0.11 |
| Horse | 2021 | 2 | 2 | 1.00 |
| Pig | 2021 | 1 | 1 | 1.00 |
This one only counts animals who came in as strays from the field, which is anything that has ‘ACO’ in the intake subtype, which is primarily ACO Pickup / Drop Off (there are 73 animals with ACO Drop Off / Ear Tipped also included). Normally, we would then split these by RTH method between RTO in the field and in the shelter, but here we will just look at the RTH rate as a whole since we did not identify a way to distinguish those yet.
The rate is pretty similar to the overall one, suggesting animals coming from the field or by the public are equally likely to be returned home.
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2021 | 64 | 2 | 0.03 |
| Dog | 2021 | 789 | 87 | 0.11 |
This shows the numbers only for strays that were public drop offs. We can see that the rate is similar to the field and overall rates.
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2021 | 462 | 6 | 0.01 |
| Dog | 2021 | 1607 | 187 | 0.12 |
| Horse | 2021 | 2 | 2 | 1.00 |
| Pig | 2021 | 1 | 1 | 1.00 |
These three time series show the RTH rate per month, to show whether there were times with particularly high or low rates as well as the overall trajectory. These figures show only dogs information because there were only 8 RTH cats in 2021.
It seems like the rate has been slowly decreasing throughout the year with peaks in January-February and June.
This is the same figure, but only counting field strays (again, anything marked as ACO pick up). Looks pretty similar to the overall trend.
This figure only counts strays who were public drop offs. Here the peak in the beginning of the year seems more pronounced, and the drop occurring around April and remaining consistent since.
This section shows the number of stray intakes over time, as well as the breakdown of strays by field/shelter intake.
Dog numbers are pretty steady, suggesting that the differences in RTH rates between months are not a result of differences in intake volume.
62% of animals come from ACO drop offs, 26% from the public, and the rest are DOA or born in care.
The average difference in length of stay (in days) between strays with RTH outcomes and all other strays is shown in the table below – roughly 16 days for dogs and 9 for cats when looking at the average.
That means that every successful RTH saves 16 days of care on average at Fresno Humane, and field RTH would save an extra day or two on average for RTH from the shelter. This could translate to pretty significant cost savings at scale – assuming a daily cost of care of 20$, if the RTH rate for dogs were 25% (reuniting an extra 325 dogs this year), it would have saved Fresno Humane about $1.0410^{5} in costs of care (this is a fairly simple calculation, but it gets at the magnitude of the potential benefits).
| Species | Outcome | Count | Average_Length_Of_Stay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | Other Outcomes | 166 | 15.93 days |
| Cat | RTO | 8 | 7.75 days |
| Dog | Other Outcomes | 338 | 18.67 days |
| Dog | RTO | 274 | 2.33 days |
The following maps show stray intake and RTH rate by Census tracts to highlight geographical patterns. The first and second tab are similar to previous metrics; the third tab, RTH Gap, shows the number of strays who were not returned home per census tract.
The data in this section includes stray dogs for which found addresses were present. There were 3871 animals with intake type of strays, but that includes some DOA and Born in Care animals. For simplicitly, the two major subtypes were examined: Field pickup and Public Drop Off, including 3394 animals in total. 39 Animals with the shelter’s address (and anything on its street) were excluded, as well as 32 with a ‘24/7 drop box’ address. Several additional addresses that include intersections with highways (41, 188, 99) were excluded because the geocoding engine failed to use the intersection listed and always opted for a generic location on the highway.
After this filtering, the data below (number of strays, rate of RTH, RTH gap) is shown for 2909 strays of which 259 were RTH.
This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists.
Here’s a sneak peak into the top 10 found locations plotted above, to make sure they make sense to you.
| Found.Location | Count |
|---|---|
| Herndon and Russell 93706 California | 33 |
| Davis and Fruit 93706 California | 27 |
| Kamm and Walnut 93609 California | 17 |
| Church and Floyd 93706 California | 15 |
| N Lake Ave and W Ashlan Ave 93630 California | 15 |
| Hayes and Belmont 93723 California | 13 |
| Brawley Ave and Lincoln Ave 93706 California | 12 |
| Wakefield Ave and Jefferson Ave 93706 California | 12 |
| Hedges and Thesta 93703 California | 11 |
| N Lassen Ave and W Gettysburg Ave 93630 California | 11 |
This map shows different demogrpahic information for Fresno County.
This section examines animals that had an RTH outcome andn both a found location and an outcome address listed to find out how far away do dogs go from home when they get lost (and are found).
Across the data, there were 2944 strays with workable intake addresses (ploted above). Out of those, only 259 had an RTH outcome, of which 7 dogs had unusable outcome addresses. For each dog, the listed intake address and owner addresses were geocoded (using Google’s geolocation service), and then the distance between the two points was calculated. Some addresses were geocoded incorrectly and were removed, as were dogs with a distance of more than 50 miles between the two points, which were few. Some of these can be corrected if needed. This filtering left a total of 243 dogs.
The distribution of distances is shown in the following figure.
Of these 243 dogs, 44% were found less than a mile away from home, and 72% were within 1-5 miles from home. These are slightly higher numbers than other communities we’ve looked at (the closest by was Madera County which had 51% of animals within a mile) 20% of all animals were found more than 5 miles away. Also, the number of dogs examined (243) is relatively small, so looking at more years might produce a more robust estimate.
| Distance.Category | Num.Animals | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| 5+ Miles | 65 | 27.8% |
| 1-5 Miles | 68 | 29.1% |
| More than a Block, Less than 1 Mile | 88 | 37.6% |
| Up to a Block | 13 | 5.6% |
Finally, we also looked at whether these distances are different based on the Jurisdiction – Fresno compared to all others. The table below shows that for Fresno, exactly 50% of animals were found within 1 mile from home, whereas for other jurisdictions it was only 30%.
| Distance.Category | Fresno | Others |
|---|---|---|
| 5+ Miles | 22.8% | 37% |
| 1-5 Miles | 27.2% | 32.1% |
| More than a Block, Less than 1 Mile | 43.2% | 27.2% |
| Up to a Block | 6.8% | 3.7% |
As another way of capturing this difference, the following table also shows the number of dogs and their average and median distances traveled when dividing them into Fresno/Other jurisdictions. The averages are pretty high in both cases because of a few outliers who went far away from home, but the average outside Fresno is still about twice as big. The median is a better indicator in this case because it is less sensitive to these few outliers, and it is more than double than Fresno’s 1 mile distance.
| Jurisdiction | Count | Average.Distance | Median.Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresno | 162 | 3.79 | 1.07 |
| Others | 81 | 6.77 | 2.69 |
249 animals did not have a ZIP code listed.
Out of all strays in 2021, only 39 had a found location of the shelter address, which is a reasonable percentage, 32 had the ‘24/7 box’ value, and 157 had to be removed because they did not list an intersection or a street number (but just a street name, for example).
Intake subtype had several values that were in very unfrequent use as you could see in the figure above.
Outcome subtype – no difference between field/shelter returns.
Other things we could show if we had the data for it:
Thanks for reading through, and we’re looking forward to talking through it and thinking about more ways to make this data useful for you.